With over 61 supported school networks and more than 28,000 schools involved, implementing a data analysis and indicator flow was crucial for the Lemann Foundation to better understand the education landscape in Brazil, evaluate supported programs, and set strategic goals to enhance education and leadership development in the country. DB provided practical solutions to make this possible, including restructuring the data architecture used by the Foundation, processing and making new datasets available in an online repository, analyzing collected information, and creating interactive dashboards automatically updated.

• Analysis of the current state of Brazilian education through data and indicators;
• Mapping schools with better performance and racial equity to replicate best practices;
• Monitoring and evaluating programs supported by the Lemann Foundation;
• Creating strategic and achievable goals;
• Providing more autonomy to the Lemann Foundation team in data analysis.

The Lemann Foundation believes that a Brazil built by everyone and for everyone is one that invests in its greatest potential: people. This is only possible with quality education and support for those seeking to solve the country's major social challenges. Thus, the Foundation aims to collaborate with people and institutions on high-impact initiatives that ensure all students learn and leaders emerge to tackle the country’s social problems, driving Brazil toward equitable development.

Data and evidence have always guided the Lemann Foundation’s work. Monitoring educational indicators is essential for the success of programs like Formar and Educar pra Valer, which have positively impacted 2.8 million students. The Foundation's contributions to the construction of the National Common Curricular Base, combining international expertise with the knowledge of Brazilian specialists and managers, is another example of creating a technically robust document.

However, new challenges require new strategies. As it mapped a long-term vision for its next 10 years, the Lemann Foundation recognized that, in a world increasingly transformed by big data, machine learning tools, and artificial intelligence, it needed to elevate its understanding, processing, and analysis of data to a new level. More than producing studies and research, it became essential to bridge theory and practice, contributing to the effective construction of human capital policies based on evidence.

To structure and implement this strategy, the Foundation established the Knowledge, Data, and Research area in 2022. Its first initiative was inviting DB to help operationalize this strategy by building a data and indicator structuring and analysis workflow. DB provided practical solutions, such as restructuring the Foundation's data architecture, processing and making new datasets available in an online repository, analyzing collected information, and creating automatically updated interactive dashboards.

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The Foundation has always been guided by data and evidence, aiming to identify and monitor key indicators in its programs. But we lacked an element of integration between data from various initiatives, enabling greater organizational intelligence and analytical capacity. This is the step we began taking with our partnership with DB.

Daniel De Bonis, Director of Knowledge, Data, and Research

Beyond understanding the current state of education in Brazil, using data and indicators provided by DB has helped the Foundation monitor and evaluate the impact and results of supported programs practically. DB’s data engineering and analysis teams designed and built dashboards with comprehensive information on the Foundation's impact areas.

Through these dashboards, monitoring updated indicators and projections of Brazilian education, the impact of supported programs, established goals, location of impacted schools, and the racial and gender profile of leadership roles in the federal government has become much simpler. According to Daniel De Bonis, Director of Knowledge, Data, and Research at the Fundação Lemann, “The very process of building dashboards activated and strengthened the Foundation’s collective intelligence, prompting multifunctional teams to reflect on their KPIs and the best ways to visualize, interpret, and explore available information, using agile methodology for productive interaction with the DB team.”

This is possible because the dashboards feature visualizations that include meticulously processed and standardized public data by DB, such as the Basic Education Census (Inep), National Literacy Assessment (ANA), Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb), Transparency Portal (CGU), PNAD (IBGE), ESTADIC, and MUNIC (IBGE), among others.

A recent example of building dashboards to monitor these critical indicators involved data from the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb). Daniel explains how the partnership enabled agile and practical analysis of these data: “With DB’s support, we were able to build a platform to analyze Saeb 2021 data in record time. On the very day the educational assessment data were released, the dashboards were operational, allowing program teams to analyze the performance of school networks with various filters and perspectives.”

The data of key educational indicators processed by DB are open to all:

• Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb)
• National Literacy Assessment (ANA)
• National Household Sample Survey (PNAD)
• Basic Education Census

In addition to public data, data and indicators related to the Foundation's programs were organized and processed, integrating information of different natures and origins in an articulate and comprehensible way for the teams. This systemic approach has been key to strengthening a data-driven culture, creating a common vocabulary for discussing indicators, setting goals, and guiding organizational learning processes. Daniel also explains that “the dashboards and analyses have been critical tools in the decision-making process, helping teams visualize and understand information more quickly and with less noise.”

Building a data- and evidence-oriented culture also requires developing analytical skills across the team – an even greater need in the context of implementing a matrix structure and agile methodology adopted by the Foundation in 2022. DB played a key role in this process, supporting the Lemann Foundation team with interactive training on data tools like Metabase and BigQuery, as well as formative activities to guide exploration of specific datasets, such as those from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

The partnership between DB and the Lemann Foundation brought together dedicated teams to build knowledge, generate insights, and understand scenarios to develop projects actively advancing education in Brazil and preparing representative leaders. We believe that data- and evidence-driven decision-making is a fundamental tool for implementing effective societal changes, and we also know that this culture begins with us.

Learn more about the Lemann Foundation here.